Students and other members of the Brandeis community are invited to sample food from the era and learn about the scrolls, their political and social context and the science of artifacts from the ancient world.

Provost Steve Goldstein and Professors Marc Brettler, Andrew Koh and Michael Henchman will discuss "Science, Artifacts and the Ancient World." Ben Federlin '14 and Alison Crandall '13 will introduce an exhibit of classical artifacts from Brandeis’ Classical Artifact Research Collection on which they have been working and provide on-site interpretation.

Brandeis University and the Museum of Science in Boston are collaborating on programming around a major exhibition of Dead Sea scrolls and artifacts from ancient Israel.

The exhibition, created by the Israel Antiquities Authority, will include fragments from 20 of the Dead Sea scrolls and more than 500 artifacts. It is scheduled to open on May 19 and to continue until mid-October.

Fragments of hundreds of scrolls have been discovered since 1947, mostly in caves in the area of Qumran, near the northwest corner of the Dead Sea. About 230 of the scrolls are manuscripts of biblical texts. The scrolls are of tremendous historical significance, offering a sense of how the biblical text developed, of the transition from biblical to rabbinic Judaism, and of aspects of the Jewish background of early Christianity.

The scroll fragments will be shown 10 at a time and rotated midway through the exhibit. In addition to the scrolls and smaller objects from the biblical period, highlights include a three-ton stone from Jerusalem’s Western Wall, limestone capitals from the first temple period (1000 – 586 BCE) and ossuaries from the early Roman period.

The exhibition, which has been presented at Discovery Times Square in New York, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and the Cincinnati Museum Center, was created by the Israel Antiquities Authority, from the collections of the Israeli National Treasures,